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Displaying entries 46 through 60 of 61 found.

Life’s Cerebral Cognizance Becomes More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

Falk, Dan. Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare. Quanta. April 19, 2024. A science journalist reports that A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness. We post from the entry and the statement itself.

The four-paragraph New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness was unveiled today, April 19, at a one-day conference called “The Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness” being held at New York University. Spearheaded by the philosopher and cognitive scientist Kristin Andrews of York University in Ontario, the philosopher and environmental scientist Jeff Sebo of New York University, and the philosopher Jonathan Birch of the London School of Economics and Political Science, the declaration has so far been signed by 39 researchers, including the psychologists Nicola Clayton and Irene Pepperberg, the neuroscientists Anil Seth and Christof Koch, the zoologist Lars Chittka, and the philosophers David Chalmers and Peter Godfrey-Smith. (Dan Falk)

The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration. Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged. First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds. Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects). Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.

Youngblood, Mason. Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. April, 2024. As his bio below says, by way of the latest computational abilities, it is now possible to find generic similarities between avian twittering and the social network Twitter. The same mathematical formats thus seem to repeat themselves in kind across each and every conversational mode.

Communication needs to be complex enough to be functional while minimizing learning and production costs. Recent work suggests that the vocalizations and gestures of some songbirds, cetaceans and great apes may conform to linguistic laws that reflect this trade-off between efficiency and complexity. In these studies, clustering signals into types cannot be done a priori, and an analysis may affect statistical signals in the data. Here we assess the language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song across three levels of granularity in syllable clustering. The results show strong evidence for Zipf's rank–frequency law, Zipf's law of abbreviation and Menzerath's law. These statistical patterns are robust and exhibit a degree of scale invariance. (Excerpt)

My name is Mason Youngblood, and I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. In my research, I apply methods from cognitive science, computational social science, and cultural evolution to questions about human and non-human animal behavior. Specifically, I’m interested in understanding how cognitive biases and population structure shape the cultural evolution of behaviors and beliefs (e.g. music, extremist ideology, birdsong, conspiracy theories).

Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer. www.pyoudeyer.com.. . The French computational psychologist (search) is the director of the Flowers project-team at the Inria Center of University of Bordeaux. Current (March 2024) projects are now much involved with chatty AI features guided by insights gained from studies with children. A recent talk is Developmental AI: machines that learn like children and help children learn better. As the quotes say, another senior scholar finds evidence that both youngsters and large language modes use trail/error iterate methods in similar ways. See also Open-ended learning and development in machines and humans on the flowers.inria.fr. site.

Together with a great team, I study lifelong autonomous learning, and the self-organization of behavioural, cognitive and language structures at the frontiers of artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences. I use machines as tools to understand better how children learn and develop, and I study how one can build machines that learn autonomously like children, as well as integrate within human cultures, within the new field of developmental artificial intelligence. (P-Y O)

The Flowers project-team, at the University of Bordeaux and at Ensta ParisTech, studies versions of hoistic individual development. These models can help us better understand how children learn, as well as to build machines that gain knowledge as children do, aka developmental artificial intelligence, with applications in educational technologies, automated discovery, robotics and human-computer interaction.

Ahissar, Ehud, et al. Mapping the Mind-Brain Duality to a Digital-Analog Perceptual Duality. arXiv:2404.05732. Weizmann Institute of Science, University of Hertfordshire, UK, and Hebrew University of Jerusalem neuro-researchers including Daniel Polani proceed to identify another cerebral complementarity akin to byte-like and relational mode computations. By one more view, this common particle/wave, me/We reciprocity composes our own bicameral coherence.

Could the abstract ideas of our minds originate from neuronal interactions within our brains? To address this question, we examine interactions within 'brain-world' (BW) and 'brain-brain' (BB) domains, which represent the brain's physical interactions with its environment and the mental interactions between brains. BW interactions are seen as analog - dynamic and continuous, whereas BB modes are digital - non-dynamic and discrete. This distinction allows BB phases to facilitate effective, albeit information-limited, communication. We review existing data showing that cascades of neural circuits can convert between analog and digital signals, thereby linking physical and mental processes. We argue that these circuits cannot reduce one to the other, so that the mind-brain duality can be mapped to the BB-BW duality. Such mapping suggests that the mind's foundation is inherently social, which can explain how the physical-mental gap coexists along with the physical body and the non-physical mind. (Abstract)

Ryali, Srikanth, et al. Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization. PNAS. 121, 2024. Into this year, Stanford University psychologists including Vinod Menon make a strong empirical case that there are significant distinctions between the bilateral brains and consequent behaviors of women and men. Using the latest explainable neural net methods (XAI), the team were consistently able to quantify an array of typical masculine and feminine characteristics. Google the title for many reviews of this major work (which of course we knew all along).

Sex is an important biological factor that influences human behavior, impacting cognitive capacity and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders. However, previous research on how brain organization differs between males and females remain mostly inconclusive. Leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence and large multicohort functional MRI datasets, we identify replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human neural architecture localized to the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network. (Excerpt)

Zhou, Shou, et al. Group-specific discriminant analysis reveals statistically validated sex differences in lateralization of brain functional network.. arXiv:2404.05781. University of Sheffield, UK and Beijing Normal University researchers provide a latest extensive technological neuroimage and graphic analysis of the real presence of complementary gender distinctions.

Lateralization is a fundamental feature of the human brain, whereof sex differences have been observed. Here, we study sex differences in the lateralization of functional networks as a dual-classification problem, consisting of first-order classification for left vs. right and second-order for male vs. female modes. For sex-specific patterns, we develop the Group-Specific Discriminant Analysis (GSDA) for first-order classifications. The evaluation of neuroimaging datasets shows the efficacy of GSDA in learning sex-specific models to achieve a significant improvement in group specificity over baseline methods. The major sex differences are in the strength of lateralization and the interactions within and between lobes. (Abstract)

Nichols, Ryan. Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges. Evolutionary Human Sciences. Volume 6, February, 2024. In this Cambridge Press journal edited by Oxford anthropologist Ruth Mace, eleven sociality scientists with postings in the USA, Morocco, Denmark, Germany, France and Spain including Mathieu Charbonneau, Miriam Haidle and Jose Segovia-Martin address a real concern that this academic field which should follow from biological sources remains ill defined, parcellated, debated to an extent that inhibits clarity and integrity. After a broad review of these issues, several pathways toward consiience are laid out.

Perez, Jermey, et al. Perez, Jeremy, et al. Cultural evolution in populations of Large Language Models. arXiv:2403.08882. Flowers Team, INRIA, Bordeaux, France scholars including Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (search) advance insightful approaches to provide better, more humane, realistic editorial guidance for these vicarious textual corpora. By March 2024, as the Earthificial section above reports, it has been noticed that these spontaneous cognitive venues actually seem to train themselves akin to how children persistently learn to speak and discover.